Love etc

The author Jenny Colgan, 31, is working on her fifth novel. She lives with her marine engineer boyfriend, Andrew, in London.

Someone once said that the best luck you can have is for your family to get on. My generation is bad at settling down, partly because so many have divorced parents and they are looking for someone who will not walk out on them. I’m lucky as my parents get on extraordinarily well.

I seemed to be the teenager from hell, going around slamming doors, yet at school I was a quiet little soul who knew nothing about boys and hated socialising. I was only 16 when I went to Edinburgh University, which was full of English people who were the acme of sophistication…